Honorable Mention at the 2014 State Fair of Texas.

I’m a bit bonkers! Despite having lots of other things to do, I’m knitting a pattern that is brand new and has only one project to show for itself.

I’m not totally crazy! At least I’m not using size 0 needles and fingering weight yarn.

I’m not sure this was the best project to use this yarn. The three skeins are unevenly dyed. One has some yellow and light green in it. The second has large lengths of white. (This one had a knot between sections of dissimilar weight and color.) The last is somewhere in between. There were places where the fibers were so tightly spun that it was almost lace weight, and there were others that were so loosely spun that the yarn broke with very little handling at all. While the breaks between pieces covered for the places where I had to cut out the flawed bits, I worry that the finished item will just fall apart.

At about 40% through! it looks more like psychedelic roadkill turtle than hippo. Bumpy, bumpy, bumpy… But colorful!

I started stuffing it before starting the eye patches. As I expected, I ran out of stuffing. This hippo is going to have a butt like mine!

I went ahead and picked up the stitches for the nose pentagon. I left the nose mostly unstuffed until I was down to about 30 stitches, then added more and more stuffing as the stitches decreased. It wasn’t that bad using DPNs.

I wish I had avoided using the same colors for adjacent pieces. I expected faster transitions in colors that didn’t always come. I also wish that I had spotted some of the longest sections of the color I wanted to use for the eye polygons and saved them. I had to dig pretty deep into the third ball to find a section that was long enough to make the second eye patch.

My hippo turned out a little nose-heavy. I wish I’d checked the balance before I sealed up the nose. His poor little back legs don’t always touch the ground. (I may add a tail to try to make him more bottom-heavy.)